What you say is logical and a smarter decision from a balance standpoint, you are not going to use 4 cores with a 512 mb design.

Yet it barely cost more to buy a quad core soc vs a dual core soc due to how small a7s are. Arm says a single a7 core on 28nm without cache is half a square mm. So we are talking roughly 1 square mm for the two additional cores. There may be some additional die size due to cache but I do not know the cache amounts.

Yet marketing four cores instead of two sell devices, especially in Asia thus it makes sense to pay the trivial amount more for a quad core. Especially if you can negotiate the price difference down due to volume.Reply

The Moto G and the Moto E have done wonders for Android's reputation on the lower end, and arguably provide a much better user experience than these Lumias. Android One (set to launch later this year) will push that same user experience down below the $100 line. Reply

This is interesting, though, in that it's like a phone from 2010 with the really crappy CPU and graphics improved. I just really wish it had a 720p screen. Aren't those common enough now to be price-competitive?

$600 phones have gotten a lot more powerful over the last few years, but this gives us a good indication of how cheap those phones would be with (generally) the same level of power.

Nintendo likes their $100-$150 portable devices. In a couple years, I half-expect them to release some kind of cheap Android phone with 3DS-like controls around the screen. (Or, knowing them, their own kind of simple OS only for Nintendo games and first-party tools and social apps? Hopefully not.)Reply

Doesn't really make sense. 4C processor in lowest end budget phone... but with storage reduced to puny 4GB (yes I know it will accept SD, but still) and 512MB of RAM. I'd much rather have 2C with 1GB of RAM.

MS/Nokia are releasing too many variants of almost the same phone. Would they not reduce R&D and manufacturing costs if they unify all of those models between 520 and 630 into one phone? They could probably boost performance a bit, too.Reply